A netizen, out of frustration and moral judgment, recently declared that politicians have turned politics into an investment. An investment to reap, not to serve, if I may emphasize his point.
I have always had a problem with this kind of diagnosis, the kind most people want to hear, a convenient convention that isolates the majority, the followers, from societal malice, playing the victim with a simplicity that puts the blame and responsibility for societal failure on a few individuals.
It is an attitude rooted in forgetting oneself, in what psychology calls projection syndrome, the unconscious act of looking for fault elsewhere without the belief or emotional strength to admit that one should also share in the blame.
If you sit with leaders, you will find they are obsessed with the problem they face with ordinary citizens, the unending pressures, the comments and judgments passed on them rightly or wrongly, and how incredibly challenging it is to please a public that is never satisfied.
The people accuse the leaders as the problem while the leaders believe the people make them do what they do most. So the projection syndrome is not applicable to one group or one direction alone, it is a mutual mirror.
However, coming to politics being treated as an investment, it is. Despite the moral idealistic principle that politics is service, the motivation could come from the fact that it first presents the opportunity to empower oneself through the acquired status, privilege, influence, state protection, severance package and all that makes service not only to the people but also being entitled to state service.
This aligns with what scholars of Rational Choice Theory, like Anthony Downs in his Economic Theory of Democracy, argued that political actors are not merely altruistic saints but rational maximizers who weigh costs and benefits. Similarly, Social Exchange Theory as propounded by George Homans and Peter Blau reminds us that human interaction is fundamentally an exchange where people invest expecting returns.
To some extent, politics is indeed an investment. We invest time, contributions, ideas to eventually be confident enough to believe we could have the popularity or acceptance to be accorded recognition. No one contests an election if he has not convinced himself that either his family, job or service has made him contribute enough or popular enough to be voted for.
Now let us come to the real problem. I often like to compare politics with courtship to make sense of it. I have not seen a man who loses pity in the eyes of a woman like the one who toasts her for a relationship.
Back then as a child I used to wonder whether it is a crime to ask a woman out. You become a real servant. I used to see how the whole family members or siblings could just call the man for any problem, and he becomes devoted like one serving a god.
Even if she has her own money from other guys she keeps, she can have you and not allow you to breathe. You cannot complain because it is an obligation and no one forced you to want a better thing.
Max Weber’s concept of charismatic and traditional authority helps explain this, the suitor, like the politician, must constantly perform legitimacy to be deemed worthy.
The truth is that if you want to lose peace of mind quickly in your community, gather some few people around to tell them you are coming out for a councilor. Even if somebody dupes you right there, it is not considered a crime because you have already lost pity.
And since that day you lose genuine thank you for anything you do because it becomes an obligation. The trouble is that even those calling for one project or the other will still insult you that they will not vote for you and would rather go with the highest bidder who gives more during party primary or brings more immediate reward, typical of the way some women think in the courtship analogy.
All daily devotions can be downplayed when there is a bigger pulse that guarantees sudden goodies.
It is considered right to lie, deceive a politician to get money from him, but it is not considered normal for a politician to do same to the public, by the way we have created the moral script one way and still expect sanity.
When you talk, like a woman would say, it is usually defended that this is the only time they would benefit from politicians and after acquiring power they will not see them again. Yet even after acquiring power, it is not previous work that speaks but a new standard.
Research findings on clientelism and prebendal politics by scholars like Richard Joseph on Nigeria have shown that this transactional expectation creates a vicious cycle where governance is perpetually mortgaged to the next election, and performance is measured not by policy but by personal handouts.
Yet there is serious envy and pressure that reminds the elected to empower themselves to be stronger because even the person you worked for for years will still demand bribe or inducement to vote.
And there is also pressure not to forget themselves because having been elected has made them a community leader such that it is no longer expected that they rent accommodation, trek on foot, but rather use big cars, wear good clothes and be able to make donations during every public event.
This is what Erving Goffman would call impression management, the politician must maintain a front stage of affluence to sustain public confidence.
When you tell people that people can do without taking bribe or largesse from politicians during elections, they defend it that it is impossible because of poverty. But the question is, what if there is no election, how would they have endured? Before the elections, during the four years, how were the poor coping?
Amartya Sen’s work on poverty and capability reminds us that while poverty is real, it is also often weaponized as a moral alibi to justify a political economy of extortion that keeps both the giver and the receiver poor in integrity.
The truth is that if you are an analyst or judge without holding a public office or working with people who hold public office, you cannot be able to imagine that it is difficult to keep rules, budget, principle and maintain priority when personal favour defines the merit of leadership, strength and performance, which makes priority on collective interest or good almost impossible.
So politics would continue to be an investment because politicians first need self-preservation to survive and be relevant. The societal orientation makes it almost impossible not to seek more returns, to be able to always give, to live up to expectations without losing appeal, dignity and visibility, which is what people and politics reward.
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com07034943575
Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
